At that time, of course, no cracks were yet to be seen in the Communist stranglehold over eastern Europe, so there was still no suggestion that dispossessed exiles would ever regain any of their lost possessions.
Kathy then revealed that several years before she had begun an English translation, but that it had not prospered and she had never finished it. I picked up the scent at once and was soon in full pursuit. Could I read what she had written? Of course. As soon as we returned to Tangier she would bring it round to me. A few days later there arrived a tattered brown parcel containing a huge pile of faded typescript in single spacing on flimsy paper. The different chapters were held together with rusty paperclips and the appearance of it all was, to say the least, uninviting. Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. By then Kathy had told me more about her father, a polymath if ever there was one, kind, gentle, a linguist, an artist whose designs were still in use at the Budapest opera, a humanist and a great lover of his country and of women (including, it is said, Elinor Glyn who was thought to have used him as the model for one of her heroes) many of whom had fallen into his arms before he married late in life the actress who had been his great love but whom, because of the shibboleths of that class-ridden world, he had not been able to marry until after his father’s death. She also told me of the great baroque castle of Bonczhida, the Bánffy home in Transylvania, which figures in the novel under the name of Dénestornya, much as some years later Lampedusa’s Donnafugata was to be a pen portrait of that author’s family palace at Santa Margherita Belice in Sicily. Both houses are now ruins, the first through the spoliations of war and official neglect (the mansions of the former Hungarian ruling class were not held in esteem in Communist Romania) and the second destroyed by an earthquake.
I think I had been told that before she became Countess Bánffy, Kathy’s mother had been an accomplished and popular actress at the State Theatre in Budapest, but I knew nothing of the story of the aristocrat’s love for the actress nor of the many hurdles to be surmounted before their marriage could take place.
Dismayed though I was by the state of the manuscript I tackled it at once and was enthralled. When I started to read what Kathy had already translated, the original text and a Hungarian dictionary at my side, I soon discovered that written Hungarian is often a staccato language even when it is at its most elegiac. In consequence a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in central Europe. Besides this the length of the work and its Dickensian range of plot and subplot, as well as the extensive cast-list, meant that anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation. What a challenge!
I at once asked Kathy if she would let me see what I could do and then, if she agreed and it seemed to go well, I would show what I had done to friends in London and ask their opinion before we embarked on a voyage which would involve much time and effort for us both. Encouraged, we set to work; and now the pages of Kathy’s literal translation (on which I could base an English text) arrived in exemplary legible typescript. Of course I must have been a little crazy to tackle anything of that length – particularly a translation of a dead author who, however well-known he may have been in his own country, had never been heard of in the English-speaking world. And not only that, but to tackle, even with the help of a born Hungarian, a book originally written in a language of which I did not then understand a single word (and I confess to not knowing many more now), was sheer folly. But I was caught by the sweep of the story, the range of characters, the heartbreak, the truth and the sheer humanity of it all. I knew that once started I could never stop until it was done for I desperately wanted others to enjoy it as much as I had. Furthermore I did have one unexpected advantage. As a boy I had often spent holidays with Anglo-Austrian cousins in their castle in Tyrol and so I did have some first-hand experience of central-European
vie
de
château which in the 1930s had barely changed since the days, thirty years before, that Bánffy had described in the trilogy. A year later the first long draft of our version of They
Were
Counted was completed. The others followed, and six years later it was all done.
Ostensibly a love story, the two principal characters are cousins, one of whom prospers while the other declines into squalor and a lonely death: but the real theme of this extraordinary family saga is the folly and insularity of the Hungarian upper classes, who danced and quarrelled their way to self-destruction in the ten years leading up to the Great War; and the insularity of the politicians who were so pre-occupied with their struggle against Habsburg domination that they saw nothing of the storm-clouds gathering over Europe. Ironically enough I had just arrived at Bánffy’s description of the events following the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo – and the sad spectacle of the youth of Hungary marching off gaily to war while the hero of the novel reflects that nothing will come of it all but the destruction and dismembering of his beloved country – when bombs started exploding once again in that sad and much disputed city.
At this time a symposium devoted to the life and works of Miklós Bánffy was held in the great hall of the Ráday Institute in Budapest. This was presided over by the then Foreign Minister, Jeszenszky Géza.
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